Charlie Fenton > Recent Status Updates

‘Katherine could tell Lady Anna had said more, but at least they’d made a connection. Anna of Cleves might not be a great beauty, but she would bring a much-needed breath of fresh air to King Henry’s court. It would take time, yet Cromwell seemed to have chosen well after all.’

‘Katherine found herself recalling the kindness Lady Mary had shown her, accepting her not as the duke’s ward, but as if she was her own daughter. She had never used hard words or criticised her. Lady Mary gave the unconditional love she’d always longed for.’

This is a great study of the human mind, I’m really enjoying it, even if it is very dark and morbid.

‘His physician ordered him to rest to hasten his recovery, so Henry spent most of the day in bed, even taking his meals in his room... The thought of marrying Henry haunted her, like a black cloud over her future. Nothing more had been said about it, but young Henry seemed more like an annoying little brother than a potential husband, even if he was in the direct line of succession to the throne of England.’

Reading for a PhD idea I have on Canterbury under the Edwardian, Marian and Early Elizabethan regimes

‘Sequestered in sanctuary, with every journey outside a risk, Francis chose the most immediate but also the most dangerous way to begin a rebellion. Clearly, he did not want to be a supplicant at foreign courts, begging for support, if he could avoid it. Nor does he seem to have had much of an interest in the political side of rebellion.’

‘The linguistic organisation of a text in Roman antiquity basically followed the requirements of something that was to be read aloud. As a result, punctuation was expressed in rhetorical units and pauses much more than today, where syntactic division of the sentences is the rule... The continuous text could be interrupted by spaces of anything from one-half to five letters in length.’

‘The Catte, the Ratte, and Lovell Our Dogge,
Rule All England Under The Hogge.

...this doggerel makes its point loud and clear: Richard, dismissively referred to as ‘the hogge’, a play on his personal badge of a white boar, is claimed to allow ‘the Catte’ (his lawyer William Catesby), ‘the Ratte’ (Sir Richard Ratcliffe), and Francis... to rule the country in his stead.’

‘Though no one ever commented on this closeness in the chronicles, it is made clear by their own actions and by the behaviour of those around them. By now recognised as the man who could most likely influence the king, Francis began to receive gifts from many different people. These offerings ranged from twelve oxen to the keys to the City of Salisbury’

‘In general, it is only around 1000 and shortly thereafter that what had previously, to a greater or lesser degree, lacked cohesion could be harmonised to form a coherent, smooth script. This script, now fully mastered calligraphically, avoids the extremes of both leanness and fullness, and achieves an element of tension through its tendency towards stretching’

‘The steady flow of grants and appointments made to Francis culminated when the new, as yet uncrowned, king made him his lord chamberlain on 28 June 1483, two days after his accession. It must have been a dazzling rise to power for a recent viscount who had been of no importance in the previous reign, and the appointment speaks of Richard’s trust in and affection for Francis.‘

‘it seems that the engagement marked Francis’s arrival as a figure of some consequence in Edward IV’s court. On 15 November 1482 Francis received his first summons to Parliament, which was to convene in January 1483. He was also invited to spend Christmas at court, apparently for the first time. Francis accepted the invitation, and it was at court, on 4 January 1483, that he was elevated to a viscountcy.’

‘Though very little survives about Anne, it is known that she was opinionated, popular and ready to risk a lot to do something she believed right, as she would show later on. Her husband clearly trusted her, and, at least in later years, showed her affection in somewhat unusual ways, eventually making arrangements for her to inherit some of his manors in the event of his death‘

‘The mature, well-rounded Insular half-uncial, which c. 700 was written so magnificently in the Anglo-Saxon Book of Lindisfarne and its relatives, was also used, with more or less success, in Ireland for liturgical and biblical manuscripts, occasionally in combination with minuscule.‘

‘The mention of Francis in the pardon does not have to mean that he was personally involved in the rebellion. He was still fairly young, perhaps too young to be considered responsible for his actions even if he had helped his father-in-law. Most likely, he was simply included in the pardon so that the taint of his father-in-law’s treachery did not stick to him‘

‘In fact, Edward IV may have granted Warwick power over Francis’s education and marriage as a way to kill two birds with one stone. First, it would establish the little boy in a Yorkist household so he could learn loyalty to Edward; at the time, however, it might have been a concession to his cousin... compensation for Edward marrying his sister-in-law Margaret Woodville to Warwick’s nephew Thomas FitzAlan.’

‘Francis was eight years and four months old when his father died, and he became the 9th Baron Lovell. Among his first duties would have been leading his father’s funeral as his chief mourner, a task which could be done even by children that young.’

‘The external appearance of charters throughout the middle ages was that of a single sheet with writing on only one side. In addition, for those documents which were written in chancery cursive or diplomatic minuscule respectively, the royal chanceries employed simpler forms, deprived from letters and private documents, for general correspondence and for legal dispositions.’

Slowly getting this but it is really not easy!

‘Francis was not a Lovell or Beaumont family name at all. There actually existed a rigid naming system for the sons of Lovell barons: the first boy was named John, the second William, and the third Robert. The Lovells had kept to this rule for three hundred years, so there must have been a reason for his parents to subvert it; they seem to have named their son after the saint on whose day he was born.’

‘The equipment of the medieval scribe, who wrote on a sloping desk, consisted of ‘chalk, two pumice stones, two ink horns (for black and red ink), a sharp knife, two razors (“novaculas sive rasoria duo”) for erasing, a “punctorium”, an awl, lead, a straight edge, and a ruling stick’. The ‘punctorium’ was an instrument for making little pricked markings on the parchment to serve as guides’

‘Parchment had hardly reached equality with papyrus in general esteem as a writing material when the late antique love of splendour led to its being dyed a rich purple colour, for use in special books; such luxury was then transferred to biblical codices. A purple manuscript of the gospels is the Codex Argenteus, probably written for Theoderic the Great.’

‘the element of pure chance which has brought the volumes to wherever in the world they are now. One may think of all great works of art as public and static, but this not at all true of illuminated manuscripts. Their restlessness has been an unexpected theme. Of the twelve items interviewed here, only one - the Hours of Jeanne de Navarre - is preserved today in the country where it was actually made’

‘The margins of the Spinola Hours are exceptionally wide, like those of the Semideus . The text area here takes up only about 4 by 3 inches: around this then are full borders, to dimensions of about 5¾ by 4 inches, all within a page size almost twice as large again, more than 9 inches high. If wide margins were thought to be a wanton luxury, these are taken to the extreme.’

‘According to the Irish historian Mary Hayden, Margaret was a woman ‘skilled in intrigue’ - and this capacity for scheming and plotting - as well as Margaret’s fierce loyalty to the House of York - led to her supporting the two great ‘pretenders’ to the throne of Henry VII, namely Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, who both claimed at one time that they were Richard of Shrewsbury’

‘Edward issued grants, warrants and other proclamations in his own name from the Tower of London - ‘by the advice of our dearest uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, Protector and Defensor of this our Realm, during our young age, and by the advice of the lords of Our Council’. The initials ‘RE’ (Rex Edwardus) at the bottom of these documents tends to be rather sketchy as Edward learned the business of kingship’

‘The speed with which printing was introduced across Europe is remarkable. By 1500, the end of the so-called ‘incunable’ period, 350 towns had printing presses, 30,000 titles had been issued, and some 9,000,000 books had been printed. Medieval manuscripts still have a certain glamour of exclusivity and uniqueness; mass-produced incunabula even now are very common.’

‘There can be many explanations of an apparent discrepancy. For one, this is a documentary hand, writing in Latin, whereas the Chaucer manuscripts are literary texts written in English in a standard book script. In palaeographical terminology, the former would be called a ‘secretary hand’ and the latter ‘anglicana’ (or ‘anglicana formata’ at its more refined level).’

‘The boy was christened Richard, in honour of his grandfather and uncle. He was born on 17 August 1473 in Shrewsbury’s Dominican or Black Friary, a couple of minutes’ walk from the abbey church, across the English Bridge. His mother was in the town as part of a wider tour of the Marches, supporting young Edward as he became established at Ludlow.’